Thursday, 6 March 2025

Reservoir East residents group

Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (17:32): (1058) Speaker, it is wonderful to see you joined there by your young assistant. My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Housing and Building, and the action I seek is for the minister to visit Reservoir East and meet with the East Reservoir residents group, a collective of public housing tenants who have come together to discuss issues that affect them and their community and, where necessary, advocate collectively on those issues. As the minister will know, there is a large amount of public housing that was built in Reservoir East in the 1950s. Like many of the large public housing estates of that era, it was built with good intentions but it certainly had the effect of clustering together a large amount of disadvantage, and that persists to this day.

I know many members of this place have worked very closely with public housing tenants in their constituencies. The member for Broadmeadows in particular, I know, does a lot of that work, and she knows, as I know, that many of those public housing tenants make a very positive and significant contribution to our community. None of us want to stigmatise those tenants or those areas. However, at the same time we do also have to recognise that those areas and those estates do have above-average levels of a number of challenges with respect to long-term employment, with respect sometimes to alcohol and drug abuse and with respect to experience of violence and other matters.

I would like to recognise the important work that our neighbourhood houses do to support those public housing estates, notably Craig Liddell and his team up at Reservoir Neighbourhood House, Chris Lombardo and her team at Bridge Darebin, and Christina DiPierdomenico and her team at DIVRS. I know the member for Northcote, who is here, works closely with those groups as well. In fact the member and I met with Chris Lombardo and Keir Paterson, who does a good job of advocating for the neighbourhood house sector, just recently.

I would also just like to recognise Louise Kenney-Shen in our office, who does a lot of work directly at the moment with many public housing and community housing tenants on the issues I mentioned, indeed helping them with maintenance issues, transfer requests and other issues. It was Louise who suggested this potential meeting with the East Reservoir residents group. Ged Kearney and I were actually door-knocking in that area just recently, but as Louise pointed out, there is nothing better than getting a group of people together to discuss issues that are important to them.

Of course we really want to support collective organising and decision-making amongst these groups, and it is wonderful to see those residents coming together, speaking with their neighbours, bringing issues together, discussing what is most important to them as a group and then bringing it to our government. So I would love the minister to take up the opportunity, if she can, to come and chat to them. I think it would be definitely good for them, but I believe it will also be good for our government, because we value the input and particularly the collective input that we get from people in our public housing system. It allows us to improve things that are happening there. It allows us to improve things that are happening in the broader community around Reservoir East, and I thank the minister sincerely for her consideration of this adjournment matter.